Welcome to our March issue – a packed one with contributions from about 50 Australian writers, several of them new to the magazine. These include distinguished journalist-editor Luke Slattery, who writes about Volume 3 of Thomas Keneally’s ‘Australians’ and finds it somewhat wanting. David McCooey offers a spirited defence of John Kinsella. Novelist Andrea Goldsmith writes about two new books on Susan Sontag – and likes one of them. We publish the first in a new series of Reading Australia essays on key Australian texts: Kerryn Goldsworthy revisits Jessica Anderson’s much-loved novel ‘Tirra Lirra by the River’. Then we have reviews by people like Glyn Davis, Joan Beaumont, Nigel Biggar, Jane Sullivan – and much more!

March 2015, no. 369

The European settlement of Australia, the colony’s earliest years, its expansion into, and alienation of, lands inhabited for millennia by the first Australians: these are the great and abiding themes of the Australian story. Together with the rather overdone nation ...

A prefatory note to this striking novel tells us that it is Richard Kline’s memoir of ‘a strange event that intervened in my life at the age of forty-two’. The following ‘short history’ interleaves sections of first- and ...

The eponymous poem in John Kinsella’s latest book recounts a group of teenagers witnessing a sack being flung from a speeding car. The sack, they discover, is filled with tortured kittens. This shocking poem of human cruelty begins a collection concerned with Kinsel ...